About

Life Like Racing

$11,784

pledged of $10,000 goal

54

backers

What is a prototype?

A prototype is a preliminary model of something. Projects that offer physical products need to show backers documentation of a working prototype. This gallery features photos, videos, and other visual documentation that will give backers a sense of what’s been accomplished so far and what’s left to do. Though the development process can vary for each project, these are the stages we typically see:

Proof of Concept

Explorations that test ideas and functionality.

Functional Prototype

Demonstrates the functionality of the final product, but looks different.

Appearance Prototype

Looks like the final product, but is not functional.

Design Prototype

Appearance and function match the final product, but is made with different manufacturing methods.

Production Prototype

Appearance, function, and manufacturing methods match the final product.

Prototype Gallery

These photos and videos provide a detailed look at this project’s development.

Our Story

Remember being a kid and slot car racing was everywhere? Remember the slot car tracks that had cars going incredible speeds and the fun everyone had racing?
Then, came the home race car sets. There were the 1/32 scale cars but they needed a lot of room to set up a race track. Then came the HO scale cars, the Aurora Thunderjets. These were one of the biggest successes ever in the hobby industry. As technology moved forward, so did HO scale slot cars. After the Thunderjets, came Aurora’s Magna-traction. This was the first time ever that magnets were used to hold the car to the metal rails in the track. Then the car that changed HO scale racing forever. The Aurora G-plus car. It was the fastest and most reliable car ever built up to that time. But, like most things, corporations came and cost reduced and performance reduced these cars leaving room for competition. LifeLike Products, developed an extremely competitive set, and were very successful. Management changes in large companies, and LifeLike left the racing hobby.

Being a life-long racing fan, we found out that the majority of the plastic tooling for the LifeLike cars became available, and our group purchased these tools. There are approximately 100 tools in this collection. With the current price of injection molding tools, these tools would cost over US$500,000 to replace.

Our goal, is to make the most reliable, quickest and most fun race sets ever produced. We plan to achieve this by the following:

1. Manage the production of the parts closely. The production would be in southern China with our team of the best quality control experts in this industry monitoring every phase of manufacturing.

2. Introduce the next generation of car and supporting products within 12 months after our product launch.

3. All sets sold in the USA will be shipped from our location in the USA and we will individually inspect and test all critical components of each set before shipping them to our customers.

4. We are bringing back a race set that is designed, built and tested by people that love and live this hobby. (not corporate people that are only looking for the bottom line).

Schedule

We have most of the inventory ready for this program. All we need is a successful KickStarter campaign to complete our schedule. Our schedule for the Milestone events is as follows:

Rewards

1. $5.00 or more.($4.00 or more Black Friday Special) A custom, four color 3d printed LifeLike Logo. Each piece has the individual serial number embedded into the back of the logo. Estimated Delivery: January, 2017

Risks and challenges

With a combined total of over 80 years of experience in this hobby industry, we are confident in the product we have and our ability to produce and ship out project. We have already passed most of the hurtles other Kickstarter projects have because we have completed the following:

1. Have all parts completed and ready for our Kickstarter launch.

2. Have tested all of our components for hundreds of hours to determine the reliability and know the product we have is extremely reliable by the results of our testing.

3. Have 95% of our tooling completed. Tooling not completed will be for new items we are planning to add into the line.

4. Have secured manufacturing capability in southern China.

5. Have a Quality Control team in place to monitor production.

That being said, there is always the chance of raw material shortages, labor shortages, strikes shipping issues and other unforeseen situations. These are situations that no one can predict, and we will do everything possible to rectify whatever the issue is in a timely and professional manner.